Roughly one hundred years ago, zoning emerged as a response to the vagaries and limits of nuisance law in controlling threats to public health and safety. It offered promise as a tool for comprehensive planning even as it rebalanced private property rights. A century’s worth of doctrine has evolved to mediate between the rights of property owners and the interests of the public.

We are now experiencing another revolution in land use regulation. The Trager Symposium will examine this next phase of development control: non-zoning land use controls. Governments, and New York City in particular, have begun to rely on contracts and novel property transactions to control development in their jurisdictions. Through development agreements, restrictive declarations,community benefits agreements, transferable development rights, conservation easements, and other tools, zoning has been both supplemented and supplanted by new techniques that challenge the traditional limits on government police powers.